Tax exempt transaction report?

[bridget_mahonia]

Can I print a report that shows me every transaction that includes tax exempt item/s?

[VCB]

We also would like a simple way to view tax-excempt sales.

[Tom]

Hey @bridget_mahonia and @VCB, thanks for bringing this up.

We don't currently offer a specific report within the online Square Dashboard that highlights items and services that are tax-exempt.

For now, you might consider downloading your Transactions CSV and viewing sales by sorting the "Tax" column.

Out of curiosity, can you reply with more on which payment methods you're using primarily (e.g. sending invoices from the dashboard or the point of sale app). In addition, do you have any other details on why this report would be helpful for your business? I'd like to be sure I'm sharing as much insight as possible with our Product Liaison team.

We'll certainly follow up with this thread with any other updates that may be useful. 🙂

[VCB]

Lately, we've been mostly using invoicing for these "no tax" situations. Ours have been agencies with tax except status that have hire or purchased our service and usually are billing back to their clients and charging tax then.  We have created special no-tax items from the POS in the past.

The request for a simple report was for our bookkeeper.  They wanted to easily check for these types of sales when there is a difference between the tax collected in Square vs tax calculated based on the gross sales.

[Tom]

Got it. Thank you very much for your reply, @VCB. I will make sure this gets in front of the right team!

[bswanz]

Saw an inquiry from what appeared to be Squre rep asking why a business would want to see a report of sales that were exempt from sales tax....from any source, but especially business that have many small transactions.

1 - When reporting sales tax, taxing authorities often require tax exempt sales to be listed.  It would be nice if Square simply summarized those sales by day and month and provided the tax exempt sales amounts.

2 - Often software that automates sales tax calcualtions and filing simply take the sales amounts provided by a service like Square.  If those services don't "see" exempt sales and back those out from total sales, those third party sevrices would over report sales tax due and businesses that didn't catch the error would overpay.

3 - Attempting to calculate and/or summarize exempt sales, and then offset that against total sales, and then having to opt out of using third party provciders that calculate and file sales tax is just too cumbersome.  This presents a very nice opportunity for Square to incorporate this detail into its reporting.  In short, delivering a summary of tax exempt sales is just way too easy for Square to do and way too hard and too time consuming for a business owner to have to do, especially when it's simple/straightforward integration for Square to integrate.

[Helen]

Thank you very much for this @bswanz! I really appreciate it and I do understand that calculating tax exempt sales is cumbersome at the moment. I will share your feedback with our Reporting team so we can improve this. When we have any updates we'll post in this thread to let you know.

[JackieCardin1]

Any updates on a tax exempt sales report?  I know when we have been audited by the IRS in the past they will want to see all of our tax exempt sales and we have to pull these for them.  We have schools, churches, local government agencies, military, etc who do business with us and it would be a lot easier if we didn't have to find these by going through each days transactions.  Thank you for looking into this.

[Helen]

@JackieCardin1 No updates yet but thanks for letting us know why you need this report.

Have you tried using another report like the Transactions CSV or Item Detail CSV report that Tom mentioned above? If you sort either of those reports by the Tax colum (which shows $0.00 if no tax is applied) you can see a list of transactions together in one report. I'll admit this is a workaround but it might help save you some time! 

[DolceCiabatta]

My problem is that we have a "tax-exempt sales" number listed on our tax report, but we can't figure out where that number is coming from.  When we download the detail, there are only 2 sales with no tax amount (total $4.85), but the Sales Tax report says that we had $109.85 in exempt sales.  Since we don't have ANY exempt sales (except gift cards), we are very confused.  

[Tom]

Hi @DolceCiabatta, I went to check on the Taxes tab and I'm not sure I fully understand which report you're viewing. Can you provide a bit more information on where you're seeing the tax-exempt sales number? Thanks for helping me make sure I'm on the same page.

[tiawinfield]

I wanted to follow up and see if Square has added a tax exempt report? 

[AshleyK]

Hi @tiawinfield! Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Seller Community. We have not added a report like this yet, but you can always create your own reports by exporting your sales summary and/or your transaction reports and having an accountant take a look. I know this is an extra step and it would be really nice to have it within Square, but we just don't have that feature yet. 

I appreciate your time and please let me know if you have any other questions!

[SycamoreWinery]

We are also needing an easier way to report Tax Exempt sales. This is very time consuming for us and I know we are over paying because we do not have a simple way to pull out these transactions each month. We primarily use Invoices for the Tax Exempt sales, so a simple "Tax Exempt" button would be helpful. I just have to make a note on every item on the invoice with "tax exempt" because I cannot find another way to note this on the entire transaction itself. 

Just wanted to add that another business is in need of this report, in case this helps on the priority list.

[RoostersPopcorn]

I am finding it hard to believe that it has been FIVE years since this subject was brought up to Square. So many small businesses are probably paying excessive taxes because they aren't savvy enough to understand the variance in filing their tax reports. 

For a company who 'specializes" in sales transactions, I find it hard to believe that this even had to be brought out by customers. It should have been something Square was educating its customers on. Especially during the last two years when every penny seems to count.

I find it dissatisfying that Square has come up with programs for its patrons to subscribe to that MAKE SQUARE more money, but haven't addressed this basic need of your customers. 

Downloading a CSV file and sorting it was a decent suggestion, but this should be an easy filter button on Reports.

Please quit "talking" about it and please just make it happen.

[chamblinsbooks]

I would just to add that in 2021 I am a seller who uses square & would LOVE to have this type of report be an option. Being a small business during such trying times & knowing I'm overpaying because I have to estimate my exempt sales is a little frustrating. Is there any movement on this type of report actually becoming available?